Members of R3 and other groups, including BYP100, Black lives Matter, Assata’s Daughters and Workers Center for Racial Justice, led by OCAD showed up to protest deportation efforts in Chicago outside offices of ICE with 300 people.

On August 19, 2017, we held vigil and rally outside the monument to slaveholder Stephen A. Douglas which is in the middle of the historic Black community of Bronzeville. The City locked the gates before we arrived. We spilled over into the street outside the park and blocked the intersection.
300 protestors from a variety of groups and communities joined with speakers from immigration rights, anti-police/ state violence, and radical Jewish orgs. We ended by reading the names of the 123 enslaved people that Douglas “owned.” He used part of his wealth to help found the University of Chicago and student activists from the Chicago Reparations Working Group joined us and gave some history about the site.

NEW SOCIAL JUSTICE COALITION JOINS OTHERS IN DEMANDING THE MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL INVEST IN PUBLIC EDUCATION IN CHICAGO

The R3 (Resist. Reimagine. Rebuild) Coalition, formed in November of 2016, includes 32 Chicago area grassroots, anti-racist, labor and immigration rights organizations. We came together to forge a shared agenda to fight for social justice in Chicago. Today we lend our support to the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM) and others in making the demand that the City of Chicago make educating our children a priority. We have seen resources go to gentrification schemes and tax breaks for the wealthy, even under the guise of a more progressive agenda. This has to stop.

Today Chicago principals will learn what funds their schools will receive. At the same time, the governor continues to resist giving Chicago Public Schools (CPS) the resources it needs and deserves. What we know is that much more needs to be done to rebuild and reinvigorate our neighborhood schools, and that should be a top priority along with spending on public services for the families of those students. In the wake of systematic disinvestment over many years, our schools are hurting, which means our children are hurting. Our communities still have not fully recovered from the unprecedented closing of 50 schools by the Mayor. This action disproportionately impacted Black and Latinx students in working class neighborhoods throughout Chicago. Our children deserve better. We demand better for them.

Whatever issues we are focused on in our work, public education matters to all of us directly or indirectly. R3 pledges its support to our friends, neighbors and fellow activists on the frontlines of this struggle. We call on the Mayor and City Council to allocate necessary funds to our neighborhood schools and we stand solidly with our dedicated public school teachers who make a difference in the lives of this City’s young people every day.

MAY DAY WILL LOOK A BIT DIFFERENT IN CHICAGO THIS YEAR AS NEW COALITION, Resist. Reimagine. Rebuild. (R3) TAKES TO THE STREETS

Chicago is still a segregated but a new generation of activists are building unity across community lines, inspired by the election of Donald Trump, the persistent budget crisis in Illinois, the continued lack of police accountability, and the crisis of public education in Chicago, disproportionately impacting Black and Latinx youth.

Over 30 grassroots and labor organizations began meeting in November, 2016 on the south side of Chicago initially to vent frustration and then to map a response to the presidential election and ongoing problems faced by Chicago’s poor, Black and Brown and immigrant communities. Groups range from Black Youth Project 100, which has led massive street demonstrations against police violence, to Chicago Fight for 15, a campaign to get a living wage for fast food workers, to Organized Communities Against Deportations, which has been advocating for expanded sanctuary for Black and Brown communities. The Chicago Teacher’s Union, SEIU-Health, Black Lives Matter-Chicago, Arab American Action Network, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Desi Youth Rising, Inner-City Muslim Action Network, Pride Action Tank and others are involved.

The group’s most recently held a citywide teach-in which drew 600 people on April 4. On Monday, May 1, in honor of May Day, the R3 Coalition will rally outside the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, Ogden and Roosevelt at 11:00 a.m. to protest the criminalization of young people of color, before marching to Union Park to join the Citywide May Day rally there. Organizers will be available for press interviews at 10:30 a.m. at the rally site. Speakers will include Karen Lewis of CTU and Charlene Carruthers, National Director of byp100.

Black, Latinx, Arab and Asian activists have been in the lead of this coalition and asserting their voices in the city’s political landscape with a greater degree of unity than we have seen in decades.

The R3 coalition is a part of the larger Beyond the Moment Coalition: http://www.beyondthemoment.org, a multi-racial, multi-issue project of the Movement for Black Lives, which includes fifty organizations and actions in dozens of cities on May Day.